[lbo-talk] A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side

[B.]

When it comes to the equivalency of corpses -- who has
produced more, the "left" (Stalin?) or the right -- I
think the following Hannah Arendt statement, repeated
in Corey Robin's _Fear_ is germaine, no matter what
the Khmer Rouge called itself, whether it be
Marxist-Leninist, Nationalist *Socialist*, or a
Peoples' Republic. All those can be terms used
cynically by all sorts of people and may have little
relevance to what's actually practiced:

"The fear of concentration camps and the resulting
insight into the nature of total domination might
serve to invalidate all obsolete political
differentiations from right to left and to introduce
beside and above them the politically most important
yardstick for judging events in our time, namely:
whether they serve totalitarian domination or not."
(Corey Robin, Fear, p. 109)

-B.

Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> [WS:] This is a gross mischaracterization - the
Khmer Rouge were the
> antithesis of Marxism Leninism.  The latter was
about power of the urban
> industrial proletariat, while the former was
probably the most anti-urban
> movement in modern history - which deliberately
destroyed anything urban
> (including the money system) and killed or
"evacuated" urban population in a
> botched attempt to build a rural utopia.  I think
there was a far greater
> contradiction between Marxism and Khmer Rouge and
between Marxism and
> capitalism.